My best friend comes to visit

A and I used to always say that we were destined to be best friends based solely on our proximity to each other.  We met each other on the first day of highschool, and since then have gone through many of the best and worst times (thankfully) together.  We'd brave the treacherous walk up-hill after school (and even though it was completely unnecessary for me to walk up the hill, I'd do it just so that we could complain about it together), our dad's would take turns shuttling us to school and home from highschool dances and when we graduated they continued to do that for our little sisters.  There was also a rumored chance first-time meeting between our mothers at the mall, where they clasped hands as if they were long-lost somethings.

We'd went on to university together, partied together, moaned and groaned about boys together, moved out together, went to concerts, were jerks together, even went to thailand in matching outfits and backpacks together.  It was a trip that we'd talked about taking together ever since we saw "Brokedown Palace"...the last piece in solidifying our best-friendedness, and we were going to test it all with a Thai prison as a backdrop.

A moved away to NYC a few years ago and most of what we share fall more and more into the past.  I can't really describe how it felt to see her and J step off that bus in Toulouse.  It was bizarrely emotional.  A is like a living time capsule for me. Looking at her is like a collapsed view of so many things that made up my life...and it really underscores where I am (and where she is) and how far we've come since before we were 25.  It's difficult to stay close with the distance and the wonky time difference and I chalk it up to taking our "proximity" for granted - I never thought about what it would mean to not live 5 minutes away from her, let alone on a different continent.  So I'd have to say it's always a little bittersweet when we see each other in new environments, because she's her and I love her - but it's a strange reminder that we're not together in the same places like we used to be.   

After having said all that - here are some pictures of us in same places TOGETHER! I was ecstatic to meet J (he's wonderful and that's a relief) and to share a little bit of what my life has been like here in France with her.

We'd concluded that between our 4 entrees and mains, we had consumed an entire duck that meal.

Before we knew how much duck we were getting into.

More photos from J's camera

This is l'eglise St. Etienne, one of our favourites because of all the churches we see around here (and we see a lot) it's the most interesting in a slap-dash patched together kind of way.  The church had run out of financing part way through construction.  It was slowly (in phases) completed over time, which accounts for the strange shape and afterthought-like look of the church.  Cathedrals and churches are generally shaped like a cross - this one, as you can see, does its own strange and wonderful thing.

When you walk by these buildings everyday, you kind of forget how old and lovely they are.    

Spring is in full force here in Toulouse.  Parks and gardens that we used to walk in during the winter look and sound completely different.  We were walking by this little pond/water feature when we heard the racket.  We spotted several of these guys croaking away.

Goodbye Toulouse...

We're leaving Toulouse for Paris next week...most things are taken care of and the next week will be relatively stress free.  We've had 2 sets of visitors since last week.  First it was A & J making a pit stop in Toulouse from their trip to Barcelona and then P's cousin J & S from Canterbury.  It is always nice to have visitors, it helps us re-see Toulouse for all its pretty charm and past the dog shit and whiffs of urine from small medieval alleys.

Here are some photos that J took during her visit - some rare ones of us at the market doing our usual market thing amidst older french women in fancy sunglasses.  They love their fancy sunglasses here.

Piles and piles of different types of salad.  I'm waiting to pay for radishes and red oak leaf lettuce.  We're at the daily market of Blvd. Strasbourg.  

Hands down, the coolest carousel we've seen so far.  Rather than garish horses and carriages on the typical merry-go-rounds, this one had different versions of old flying machines, boats, a giant bucking ant, rhinos and a crocodile.  After one turn, I saw a little boy go up to the old man who ran the thing and the old man pulled out a little candy from his pocket for the boy.  Love, love, love that.  

My blog has come to haunt me

When I created this blog I had all the best intentions in the world to post often and to post things of quality, but over the last few months it's become somewhat annoying.  Annoying because it's become a bit of an obligation.  The resulting entries are, watered-down, rushed and uninspired.   I just read a couple of my recent entries and can't believe the amount of clipped sentences and sentiments.  I mean why go through the motions of posting something if it comes from nowhere intended for nowhere.

What's the point of emitting or broadcasting something if it doesn't stick, and if it doesn't provoke feeling, thought or discussion?  I don't mean to launch complex debates or forums about what I write about, but I consider an entry a "success" if I can make someone think or feel something that's outside of their immediate experience.  Maybe in particular about food, maybe an entry about chocolate made you think about first time you tasted REAL chocolate - did your world change? From that point on would you continue to classify "smarties" as chocolate?  Or that first time you tasted something that was so perfect that it made you think all the way back to where it came from, how it was tended and what creativity and mastery was required to render it to the state of perfection in the form of a bite in your mouth.  

What I love about food, aside from the obvious sensory satisfaction, is that there's a sense of place, history, love and ceremony to making and eating food.  Maybe it's the food geek in me that wants to force a lot more meaning into food than what is sitting there in front of me on a plate.  And it's the same writing geek in me that wants words to be more than just what's on the screen/page.  There's a potential in making the experience of reading or eating as immediate or as transcendent as you want it, but the most interesting part of it all is where it meets - you.  The person, forming the relationship between the immediate sensory experience and everything else that matters or doesn't matter floating in time and space.

Maybe it's presumptuous of me, but I'd like to write for that end.  

Has anyone seen "the Watchmen"?  I'm starting to make myself out to be a real Dr. Manhattan.  I mean well though.

Just when we were getting into it...

It's mid-march and I'll be leaving Toulouse in a month.  A month!!  We finally got some of that southern france weather (the weather we came for) this weekend.  It was 19 and sunny.  yeah, I know.  Our landlord's mother, told us that this has been an unusually cold winter and that this 19 degrees business usually starts in February, but instead we were slogging through an extra rainy/cold winter.  But no complaints, we're going to make up for it this next month.  P and I went to lunch at Place St. Georges...or where the rich, beautiful and sunglasses clad french families go to dine.  *sigh, here in France, small children wear nicer clothes than I do - and by nicer I mean WAAY nicer,  like burberry trenchcoats and such.  

P got steak tartare (our first time here), and the thing came out as a raw hamburger mound with chopped up cornichons, onions and capers in it...AND a raw egg right on top.  I mean, we knew what we were getting, but it was still a sight for us non-raw-hamburger/egg-eating types.  It was a lot of raw beef and raw egg in one sitting, but we liked it and ate it all.  It comes with worsteshire sauce, mustard and tobasco sauce on the side - a nice lady sitting at the table next to us gave us instructions on how to eat and manage the thing.  Put the sauce on it, mix it through with the egg (much like one would prepare fresh hamburgers, only you don't throw it on the grill), then mound it onto bread and eat. 

When we're not pigging out on raw meat amidst beautiful french families, we're eating this:

Choucroute garni - it's an Alsatian specialty of saurkraut (warmed through) garnished with sausages, smoked meats and potatoes.  We walk by this stuff at the pig butcher stalls, but never tried it until last week.  We asked the lady to explain to us what to do and how to eat it and she packed up enough for a meal for the 2 of us.  In the picture we have: 2 types of sausages, a slice of smoked pork shoulder, some boiled potatoes and the choucroute.  Who knew a steaming mound of hot sour cabbage would be so good.  There's a butcher that specializes in choucroute garni and we're going to get stuff from there next time and see how the two meals compare.

love - a belated valentine's day post

If P and I celebrated anniversaries together, we would have just rounded our 7th year.

22 year-olds P&P having lunch at the Maggie Benston Centre at SFU.  I really dug P's "Andrew-Jackson" coif back then.  He wears it differently these days.

After 7 years together I didn't really think that there would be much more to learn about each other...I kind of felt that we were now in "new-experiences-together" mode, and less the "getting-to-know-each-other" mode.  We're at the point where we anticipate each other's sentences and jokes don't need to be finished before we mind-meld into "pault" and crack up at punchlines that never drop.  We even got each other the exact same valentine's day surprise, each having secretly dropped by the same chocolate shop minutes apart from each other.  We have always spent a lot of time together...we like to.  Since coming to Europe we've taken it all to a whole new level, like we're in one of those machines that make diamonds from carbon (what do you even call those things?), it's as if we get super intense, highly-pressurized, focalized laser beams of each other.  All pault all the time.  And yet, I'm happy to report that we still manage to learn new things about each other.  Love and romance thrive on mystery, non?  Check out these new mystery nuggets that I recently discovered in my lover:

1) P CANNOT STAND middle-aged women with short, severe bobs (straight cut bangs, straight cut everything).  He can handle the two separately, he might even like either of those components in their own right, but just NEVER together.  I found this out when we sat across from a tall norwegian woman with that kryptonitic combination, paul was made irritable and uneasy that whole train ride.  

2) P HATES wind, or even breezes.  He gets fussy and unnerved by the slightest movement of air out of doors.  A perfectly beautifully, sunshiney day is, in Paul's opinion, ruined by the slightest traces of a breeze.  He gets so worked up about it.

   

Here we are on the windy west-coast of norway.  I am lovingly drawing P's hood, to minimize his exposure to wind.

3)P tolerates human cloning (this is a gross simplification of an hour-long debate) - like, really?  On a more positive note, we've come to the conclusion that we very much look forward to having traditional "mixies", rather than clones.

photos of the two of us together are rare.  This was at Ruby Lake on the Sunshine Coast.  Our friends V and S took us to a secret spot where we picnic-ed, swam and went to town on the rope-swing.

It's been 7 years, and P just doesn't want to hear it sometimes.

random things...

It's been a while so I thought I'd rummage through my photos to find some stuff that I'd been saving for posts.  I've given up on photo-documenting things, our camera sucks and I am SO not diligent about taking photos, so you'll have to bear with the lack of images that go with my ramblings.   French lessons are going great and we're feeling less socially/linguistically retarded here in France.  Since I last posted we had a visit from P's cousin Bjorn, and we've been hanging out with friends from school.  You can only imagine the hilarity that comes with a group of internationals communicating in their second/third language.   Random pictures as promised:

 

Typical lunch - a spread of the cheeses, saucisson/jambon or cornichons and pickles that we have kicking around, and we always have these things kicking around.  I generally dislike sandwiches and Paul lives for them, so this is a happy medium - we get all the components of a sandwich (bread, meat, cheese) without being bound by the form.  Crackers (good crackers) are hard to come by here.  The cracker aisle in the grocery store consists of different forms of dried toast, so if that's what you're into, you'd be in dried toast heaven here in France.  

I was missing burgers a while back so we decided to make them.  Hamburger buns don't exist in grocery stores so we had to improvise a little.  The closest thing that I could think of was a brioche.  I'm going to make a generalization here: overall food quality is high in France.  I think people here are specific about what they want and demand a lot out of the food they buy and eat, which really means that a grocer or a store needs to meet those demands.  You can see it in the way customers ask for very specific qualities for the food that they're buying and you can hear it all the time, "I want a crottin that's not too dry", "a baguette that's well cooked", "I want smaller leeks" etc.  After having said that, the burgers turned out pretty lacklustre because of the beef.  Beef is just not as good (meaning tasty and fatty) here as it is back home.  I don't buy/eat beef all that often here and when we do it's usually for stew, and I made beouf à la ficelle one time, in which you boil beef until medium-rare with vegetables.  I know what you're thinking, "boiled beef?", but you just gotta think about cooking beef differently here.

Here's another picture from our window - bored of them yet?  The sunsets and the sun rises have been really beautiful the last few weeks and I tried to do my best with our crappy camera.